March 25, 2018

Just Do It

After viewing the incredibly well done documentary "I Am Another You" I wanted to learn more about filmmaker Nanfu Wang and found this posted on her website:

My company is called A Little Horse Crossing The River, and it's from a story that my dad told me when I was six or seven, and he passed away when I was 12. So in my whole life, I always wanted a father figure that could tell me, "Hey, this is the right thing to do," or, "This is the wrong thing to do." But I never had that. But the story he told always stayed with me.

The story is about a little horse, and one day the mother horse asked the little horse to go across the river to get something, but the little horse had never crossed the river and he went and came back in a few minutes and the mother horse said, "Did you get the thing that I asked you for?" And he said, "No, because I didn't go," and the mother went, "Why?" And he replied, "I got to the river, yet the squirrel in the tree yelled at me and said, 'You will drown in the river, my father even died, it's so deep,'" And he stepped back, and the buffalo in the river said, "No, no. It's okay. You can cross easily. The level of the water is only at my ankles." And so he didn't know what to do and he came back to ask the mom.

My dad told me, "Lots of people will tell you advice based on their own experience, what they think is right. And oftentimes that advice would be contradictory, and you only need to try it yourself to find it out." And I felt that was true with every stage as I was making the film, because from pre-production to distribution, you get all the people's opinions, and I feel you need to follow your heart and just do it and find it out yourself. That's my advice.